 All right. Well, welcome everybody. Good to see everybody here. We have a really interesting mix of people from here in Vermont and surrounding areas. Video, as you saw briefly, from some activists from Labrador. We have a special guest from Quebec who will be saying a little bit after the video and also helping answer some questions. So we have basically five presentations that need to go for about ten minutes. I'll introduce people. I'm Brian Tokar. I'm a lecturer in environmental studies at UVM. I've written several books, including most recently, Toward Climate Justice, and I'm on the board of 350 Vermont Manly Institute for Social Ecology. And we've been working with lots of other good folks on pulling together the events that are happening both today and tomorrow in response to the annual meeting of New England Governors and Eastern Canada Premieres, which as you all know is happening up at the top of the Mountain and Stow. If you don't know that we have campsites and are going to be camping and doing some strategizing conversations this evening and tomorrow and then we'll be up outside the resort where they're meeting mid-afternoon tomorrow. And if people aren't familiar with the details or have any questions about the particulars of what we're doing, feel free to ask or we'll have an update at the end of the session. So I want to introduce my friend, Jeffrey Gardner. He's a writer and a translator, grew up in the anti-war movement in New York City, was a tenants' rights and environmental justice activist in Minneapolis, Cambridge Mass, and here in New England in the past five years. He's been a member of the illustrious Upper Valley Affinity Group. Working on energy, climate, and climate justice issues, looking for clues about how and where the climate movement should focus and take action. Jeffrey will talk to us briefly about the triangle of corporations, their investors, and the regulators who continue to propel us on the climate payouts here. I thought what I would do is talk about the history of how we got to where we are especially with respect to electricity. Long ago, 140 years ago, Thomas Edison had the bright idea of having invented the incandescent light bulb that he could bring electricity into homes. Then lighting by electricity wouldn't be restricted to arc lighting in the streets. That had already been done. He began to do that. What it required was very big, very heavy electrical lines that had to be buried. And what's more, the loss in moving electricity across those lines, 100 volts at a time, not very much, caused a huge amount of resistance and it was very inefficient a lot of electricity was lost. Other people had a bright idea. If we put these lines overhead and made them very small, we can use these new things called transformers and we can step up the generation of electricity or we can step up the amount of voltage that we send across these lines from the source of generating and then we can step it down again with transformers on the other side and thus began the battle of the currents as it was called, the war of the currents. And very, very quickly, for all kinds of good reasons, AC current one out over Edison's DC current. Why? You could move electricity over long, long distances without very much loss. You could do it cheaply because you didn't have to invest in huge wires and you didn't have to dig up the ground. You just put up posts and strung small wires. And it was popular. Why was it popular? One reason was you didn't have noisy plants generating electricity within a mile of where you lived or even closer than that. You could put your plants way, way far out and away from everyone. That was very attractive. You could have this wonderful source of energy without even realizing that it was there. And this touches on problems actually like mega dams and where we put our electric plants and our situation here in Vermont actually. Why? The places that were important initially in stringing AC wires and generating AC power were the industrial and urban centers. Rural places, oh, they could be where you put the plants. They didn't matter so much. And in fact, by 1935, just about every urban center in America was fully electrified. The rate of electrification in rural America, about 11%, these places didn't matter. They were just the places in between. As often they are in real estate, I was once talking to a real estate agent and I described where I live and she said, oh, you live in one of those places that holds the world together. And she didn't mean that in any sense except that I'm interested in real estate value here and there and there's nothing in between. That's just holding, it's the glue that holds the world together. She didn't mean anything ecological. Rural places were like that relative to utilities and electricity. It wasn't until about 1947 after World War II that not even fully electrified, but rural areas were about 75, 78% electrified. And then finally they made it into the 20th century by JFK's time, 1960 or so. And we find that really hard to think about because we're so adapted to the way we live, the power we use, and we don't think much, although maybe we do, but we as a big collective don't think much about where it comes from. Now, an interesting thing about the way this battle worked out in the end is that if you are going to build these big plants further away, that required big capital, lots of investors to put up the money to build that infrastructure rather than this small company, that small company that would have been required by DC. And DC would have been close to its customers. Each smaller company would have had its customers, they would have been relatively close. You wouldn't have had this vast, vast centralization of the power source and the transmission lines and the grid that they eventually came to depend on. And this meant that in any area that was electrified, basically all the urban areas of America, you would have usually one big company that had captured the market. No market, no competition, no regulation by market of the price. This goes contrary to, let's say, fair. It's a situation more like what the railroads were, or big shipping companies. But even there, there was some measure of competition, at least in certain areas, that there was no competition meant that people had to be protected from price gouging. Therefore, you got regulatory agencies that set the rates according to rules that they developed. So you have big single corporations, you have monopoly regulation by government agencies, and all of this depends on AC power. What has that gotten us? It's gotten us a regulatory system where the big companies come in, they say, this is what we want to do, the regulators look at it. Mainly what they look at is to see whether there are enough investors that have reasonable economic plans so that the whole thing will fly. One interesting thing is that in the last 20 to 30 years, the investors at the level of generating power are somewhat less important than they used to be. You see that with something like the gas power lines, not electricity now, but heating right here in Vermont. There are investors in these companies, but they're not on the line in any reasonable way. If the project fails, the people who are going to pay for it and the people who are repaying the cost of the project are the ratepayers. It's not the company, it's not the investors in the company. They're safe, they can make money, they really can't lose a whole lot of money in the situation we've set up. As far as regulation goes, the important thing about it is that there's an assumption all the way through that the purpose of whatever it happens to be in electrical utility in these cases is to serve some kind of public use. And of course the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution says that land, private property cannot be taken for public use without just compensation, but it can be taken. And so all kinds of eminent domain issues come up and have been dealt with. And early on public use was kind of a given. I mean electricity was an obvious good thing, just as being able to travel on railroads was an obvious good thing. And so it seemed reasonable to take property and land for that purpose. The issue of what just compensation would be has always been a tortured issue, usually the way it works as it's worked here with the Addison County Pipeline is the people who want to do the pipeline, set up the electrical company, whatever it is, come and say we need your land and we can take it under the Constitution. And we've got regulators who say we can do that. And so here's a sum of money, just sell to us because if you don't, we'll take you to court, you'll end up having court costs and you'll end up getting a lot less money. Not adjust an equitable situation. Public use, very tricky, especially when you get to where we are now. The country is fully electrified. Is it still a big deal? Do we really need more? There have been questions about need all the way along when you have a regulatory system that can take land for public use. Does there also have to be a need? Again, looking at the situation in Vermont, we issue the state issues, we don't, the state issues certificates of public good for its projects. What's included in the public good? For one thing, to meet that criteria, you have to meet the standards of the state's energy plan, comprehensive energy plan, the CEP. What does it say, for example, about gas? About gas is a long chapter and in that chapter there are some very tepid warnings about the dangers of so-called natural gas as a producer of greenhouse gases. But then at the end of the chapter is a very powerful recommendation, recommendation number one. And that recommendation is that the state ought to expand natural gas infrastructure because it's clean, it's plentiful, and it's cheaper than oil. So to be a public good, if you're building gas, is already a given. The first thing this brings to mind is that we need different criteria about what a public good is. Natural gas is not clean, we all know that. When you take into account methane leaks, it's probably just as bad as coal, let alone oil. And what's more, it disrupts people's lives. And what's more beyond that is that as you build this infrastructure, you're dedicating yourself to 30 or even 40 years of using that fuel rather than what we would like instead and that is renewables. Not a good thing. What we need to do, one thing we really need to concentrate on, is reforming the regulatory process and the agency itself. One place to begin is to get a reasonable definition of what a public good is so that it takes into account environmental consequences. Number one among those would be considering climate change. We're running out of time already. Let me race on to a number of other things. We also need a situation where we can combat that recommendation in the comprehensive energy plan. Right now, you come in with a gas plan, it's going to work, it's going to be fine. If we pass no new fossil fuel infrastructure legislation, that immediately would be wiped out. It wouldn't solve all of our problems. What it would do is clear the field so that there really is a need to increase our use of electricity as there would be if we start doing electric cars, heat pumps and so on and so forth. Then it would have to come from truly renewable sources, solar, some wind, mainly solar and that implies the need for battery storage. Further, it's possible to consider more drastic actions. For example, I hope everyone is aware of the public trust suits that are going forward where groups, especially a group of children who started in Oregon, have been suing the federal government for not maintaining the trust that they have, the duty that they have to protect us. We can do that here in Vermont. We could, for example, sue the PUC for the very same reason, the Public Utilities Commission. They've done a terrible job of making sure that we don't suffer the consequences of climate change. One further note about that, and I think this is really important and maybe not so as expensive as what I just mentioned, and that is we do not take into consideration anywhere in this country when we're building pipelines, when we're fracking gas, when we're doing those sorts of things. We don't take into consequences in local permitting what's going on at the fracking site or where people are experiencing pipelines nearby or where they're suffering from the health and safety issues that come up with that kind of infrastructure. We do have to take both of those things into account. Climate change counts for nothing in state regulatory agencies. They say this doesn't apply here. It's not our problem. Whatever happens to the climate as a result of what we're considering is tiny given the whole situation. That has to go. What's more, the health and safety of people in Nebraska, in Ohio, in North Dakota is just as important, I think, to all of us as is the health and safety of people right here in Vermont and their health and safety issues right here in Vermont as we all know really well. That's part of the story. There's more. Thank you. Next, we have our visitor from all the way up in Northern Maine been traveling since very early this morning, Becky Layton Bartowicz, former chair and member of the Executive Committee of Sierra Club Maine since 2007. She lives on North Haven Island, Nobscott Bay, where she has a small organic sheep and vegetable farm. Thank you. There's so many things that you've just said that are relevant in this subject. And I have a PowerPoint which my friend Joan Sacks put together. So I'm just going to run through it. But just to say that the PUC Public Utilities Commission in Maine is definitely subject to some of the same complaints that we have all over. And we have a governor that is the predecessor to our president. We've been experiencing a pretty serious decline in environmental laws all over the state. So just to start with. So are you going to push the forward or shall I do that? That'd be great. So this actually is a picture of a transmission line. The New England Clean Energy Connect is a planned transmission line that is supposed to go through from Colburn Gore to Lewiston and connect to the power grid, ISO power grid in New England. And it's 95 miles of transmission line, actually 54 new miles. And I think this is the picture that CMP would give you for what a transmission line looks like. It looks beautiful. Neglects to tell you that they are spraying Roundup all over it once a year. And that is taken, I think, in a perspective so that you don't really see what the horrible scouring of the environment is for the next one. So it's 145 mile long. This is the details. So it's the map. We can't really make this any bigger, but you can see islands right here. Some of these islands right here. It's going to be coming down from Canada. It's actually the beginning of where they were planning for the East-West Highway is right here. Come down through Lewiston and then connect to the ISO grid in Lewiston. So 53 miles and $950 million of a new transmission line on land that has been, actually, they've received the easements from the local towns and small towns which are still in economic stress since 2008. And so it goes through the connection down to the power grid. They would expand 92 other miles of transmission line. And so I'm not exactly sure what that means, but I think that means they have to increase the number of overhead power source to the ISO New England. And of course then they would have to be re-cutting the whole transmission line between Lewiston and Massachusetts. So vegetation and what would happen in the development of the corridor. There is, so we have, next slide, please. So we have a lot of questions about, oh yeah, questions to be considered. What are the visual and environmental impacts? The very beginning of this project, it goes over an iconic, in the Forks area, it's an iconic area where a lot of people do white river rafting. It's a beautiful untouched area of Maine. They either, they are going to go under the river or they're going to go over the river. In either case it will have significant environmental impact. Just right there. One of the details that I have, let's see where is it. So it crosses, that's the Kennebec River Gorge there. The next thing is what impact will it have on our water and associated habitats? It cuts through 263 wetlands. It crosses 115 streams. There are inland wading bird habitat. There are remote ponds, burnal pools. So there's a huge amount of wetland destruction that is to happen. And I'm going to circle back to that again in a minute. So I'm not an expert on property value and tourism, but I can't imagine it's going to increase the property value or the tourism to the areas where the transmission lines are, even if it's just for, you know, I could go on, never mind. Aesthetically I think they're horrible. The impact, and we're going to be hearing more about, oh, did I jump too fast? You jumped a little too fast. We'll skip over that one. So we are going to be hearing about what is happening in Labrador, et cetera, with this, but I just to say that Sierra Club Maine strongly supports the native indigenous peoples and impact to them. This is not a clean energy project. It's going to be flooding a new area. It's going to be causing methane hydride, actually, and so it's, I'm sorry, methylmercury, and increased methane. And so it's, you know, it's a deep concern to us when we stand with the native folks. This last one is that the question really is, is this the wave of the future? More large-scale transmission lines? We have had a recent project in Maine, in Booth Bay, Maine, where we did a microgrid, built a microgrid, and it was a test with Sentinel Power down one of our fingers in Booth Bay. And they, instead of bringing the transmission line, created a way of, they did a lot of solar energy, they did a lot of efficiency work, and they also collected cold storage to offset air conditioning during the peak of the summer. And it saved somewhere in the neighborhood of $67 million of transmission cost down just one peninsula, and I think it's about 20 miles. I don't know if you agree with that. So it's, you know, microgrids could save a lot of money. Plus, you know, there's a lot of other reasons to consider them. I'm hurrying because I think I only have 10 minutes. So there's an urgency to find reliable clean energy. There's nothing really reliable about what we can expect from the Canadian, from Quebec hydro, because it's a Canadian government-owned company. And so when Canada has, you know, a power shortage, they are not likely to, and it's probably going to be the same time that we do in New England, they are not likely to be giving us the power, and there's no promise that they will, nor is there a promise of a reduction in cost. So it's not really a reliable source. Three minutes, okay. So I talked about the wetlands. I talked about the waiting habitat. Let's go on to the next thing. What's in it for Maine? What do we get? We get a lot of environmental damage and a lot of environmental costs. Do we get energy? Well, that's yet to be known whether we will get energy or not. There's a small amount of energy, but it's enough energy in some areas that will likely suppress the renewable energy, burgeoning the renewable energy field in the state of Maine. It was the fastest growing industry that we had in Maine, corporations that, you know, the one that we know the best started in a garage probably 10, 15 years ago, and they now have corporate accounts and they are, I think, last time I talked to the president, they have 160 employees, but it's really reducing, given that the climate is with our governor, et cetera, is not a good one for them. And this would just impact them further. Jobs, there may be some construction jobs, unlikely to be Maine construction jobs because the people who built transmission lines are not normally from Maine and we're not trained to do that. Taxes, there's a lot of bullying that's happening in the local communities. They are promising, this is what I wanted to cycle back to the wetlands, they're promising a lot of tax dollars going to each of the communities, but we have an in lieu fee program for mitigation of wetland destruction in Maine. Unfortunately, it's the first one in New England, we argued that we should not have it, but that means that, even though the Clean Water Act requires no net loss of wetlands, you can pay money to the state to save wetlands that might be destroyed some other way and then you can have at it with the other wetlands. So I suspect that the tax dollars or the dollars that are going to those communities are actually the dollars that they would be paying into mitigation. In any case, we have to know what is the source, what is the money, what are they really promising the communities and these, a lot of these small towns don't have a lot of resources and they don't really have the state supporting them and what the economic benefit of not doing this destruction in their community would be. So those are just, we need to think about what the environmental economics is. And let's see. So, I think that's pretty well, pretty well. I'm just going to say that the only people really benefit are the international, is the international corporation that owns Central Maine Power and they're the shareholders and the CEOs. So it's not likely to benefit our state. So we have actually entered into an unusual partnership with, as stakeholders in this, with some power companies that are, there's a biomass natural gas power company and they're three power companies that are also interveners in this that are small scale power companies, local power companies. And so if you have further questions about that I can answer some more. And I just want to mention that the, there are four, there's a bipartisan group of legislators who wrote as to the Public Utility Commission opposing this and that's quite unusual in our state right now. There are four of them from the utilities and the Energy Utilities Committee, Joint Committee and the Natural Resources Committee just saying they do not see how this is going to benefit the state of Maine. So ask me questions further. Thank you very much. So next we have our video presentation and I saw there were two people speaking there but the one person I have information about is Roberta Benefield. And which one is she? On the right. On the right. She's been a river advocate for over 20 years. She has been the river keeper for the Grand River Keeper Labrador since 2011. Has a VA in Environmental Studies from Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. The owner-operator of dog kennels in Labrador called Goose Bay Crittersitters so she can keep the lights on while volunteering to try to save the rivers. She loves canoeing the river and she says, but alas it could soon be three long flat reservoirs. No fun paddling that for 10 days. Here they are. Welcome to the Musgrave Falls Hydroelectric Project not green, not clean, not cheap but who pays the price presentation? I'd like us first to welcome Roberta and she will introduce herself. Hi, I'm Roberta Benefield and I'm with Waterkeeper Alliance and the Grand River Keeper Labrador. I'm the river keeper for that group and I'm also on the standing committee of the Labrador Land Protectors. Welcome. And I'm Tracy Doherty. I'm a Labrador Land Protector and Grand River Keeper. I'm also a student of the Inuit Bachelor of Education program which is focused on land-based education. I'm also a Nunaziavut beneficiary. I want to introduce you to our beloved Grand River. It's also known as the Mr. Shippu by the Inu and it's got the names Hamilton River and Churchill River which speaks to the colonial history in our area. There's already one hydroelectric project on the river. Most of that power is sold to Hydro-Quebec under a 1969 contract. That's at Churchill Falls. Two more dams are proposed. Musgrave Falls is almost completed and Gull Island is in the works. Musgrave Falls is near completion. Our precious river is 856 kilometers. It's the longest river in Atlantic Canada. That's 532 miles. It drains an area of 79,800 kilometers squared 30,800 square miles. There's already methylmercury contamination in larger fish from the original hydro project. And now I'd like us to look at what are we seeing as the issues that need to be addressed with the Musgrave Falls project. So it's this methylmercury contamination that we're very concerned about. More dams equals more methylmercury and it's poisoning the traditional food web of the Inuit, the Inu and all residents of the Happy Valley Goose Bay area. Also this methylmercury is traveling through Lake Melville up the inlet to the Inuit community of Rigalette who consume country food. It's a staple in their lives. The Harvard study confirms methylmercury poisoning in humans from consumption of fish, birds and seal. Recommendations are on the table but have not been implemented. The North Spur is another major issue of this project. The North Spur is a natural dam. One of three dams proposed and already being built. This particular area is fraught with quick clay which is a marine clay that's prone to liquefaction. A proper risk assessment has not been done. In our opinion we've had an expert from Sweden help us with this project and he has recommended a proper risk assessment and the government has refused to do it. If this dam should break either one of the three dams the communities of Happy Valley Goose Bay would go partially underwater and the map behind us is from Nalcor's own studies showing how much of the community of Happy Valley Goose Bay would be flooded. The community of Mud Lake however would be devastated completely. It would go totally underwater. As an indigenous person I'll say I'm an indigenous environmentalist I'm concerned that the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is not being respected in our community. At the joint review panel we had countless wealth I shouldn't say countless we had 86 recommendations regarding this project and they were not implemented. The UNDRIP, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People calls for free prior informed consent and I'll add in most circles we're talking about deep meaningful consent. Some of that began however and was reflected in the joint review panel but as I say those recommendations were not honored. So the UNDRIP recommendations that indigenous people who have been dispossessed of their land and our connections to our land this needs to be addressed. The price of this project has doubled since it began. The original quote to get the project sanctioned was 6.2 billion. It's now at 12.7 billion. Now Core Energy is a Crown Corporation so the shareholders of this project are us, the citizens of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. We have to pay that bill that $78 billion over 50 years spread among 500,000 people we're extremely worried that our province is going to actually be bankrupt. So when we consider these really serious issues that need to be addressed what do each of you suggest could be possible ways to address these issues? Well we have to be let's not be afraid to engage in difficult uncomfortable conversations. First off we have the independent scientific review by the independent expert advisory committee and they are recommending while there are four recommendations the one that we consider the most important is that the cleared areas be removed of all the topsoil and that the wetlands be capped. This needs to be done to mitigate as much as possible the methylmercury contamination. That report was tabled in April 2018 this year the spring of this year however the government has yet to act on this expensive study. So with regards to the North Spur we have connected with Dr. Stig Bernander in Sweden who has given us the answer to how a risk assessment should be done and what studies have to be done in order to tell whether or not the North Spur will hold under pressure and under extreme water pressure from the upper church or from the river. We want Dr. Bernander's studies and the risk assessment to be taken up by the government in Alcourt and they have refused to do so. And coming back to UNDRIP the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People it has to be recognized that with self-governance in the works we're new nations we've been oppressed people centuries now economics is where we're heading as stakeholders to take our rightful place as the original peoples on this land but it's a process and we're evolving and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples helps us to respect all of us as individuals within our nations and the voices have to be heard through the studies that I've been doing I'm just learning a lot of this myself and things that used to be in place like clans now have a modern spin it can't only be the business voice in our community that is heard all the voices have to be heard and that includes our children and our children's children the seven generations to come that is a fundamental value of our people and as a Ninociovic beneficiary I want to say that in our constitution we are responsible to treasure our lands our waters, our ice that's our responsibility and for everyone who's in attendance for this presentation today what do you feel could be actions that they can take right where they are to help with these issues that we're seeing there's a lot of research that's been done into energy, sustainable energy it is doable we need to get behind local projects there's so much now that has to do with energy democracy local ownership of small projects, solar and wind can be done these projects it has been proven will outperform these mega projects they won't be boom and bust they'll be maintainable and those long term jobs will come from maintaining these local projects it's environmental justice and it's energy democracy to get these small projects that are leaving a small footprint on our environment governed by the local people local people will have decision making power that's what we've got to aim for and what we'd ask you folks to do is to lobby lobby and understand and learn about mega hydro and what the effects are lobby against the transmission lines that are coming into your territories and into your states from Canada these transmission lines are bringing power from our rivers and by the way there's about 116 more rivers slated in Canada to be damned as a matter of fact there are 8 more rivers in Labrador alone that have already been assessed for hydro projects so we don't need any more major hydro projects we don't need them in Labrador we don't need them in Canada and we don't need them anywhere on the planet so don't no longer accept power from any mega hydro because they are not clean they're not green and the people who live in these communities pay the ultimate price sometimes even with their lives thank you for being here thank you that's around so folks can take a look at this map and get a sense of the geography we have Labrador in Newfoundland Church of Falls the original dam is here and the new project that we were hearing about is up here so I'll just pass this around so folks can get a closer look I mentioned at the outset that we have a special last minute guest from Montreal Phil Raffles is a journalist energy policy analyst many years ago 25 years ago when many of us were involved in opposing an even larger scale project that was proposed by Hydro Quebec that was going to be sending electricity to Vermont and all of the Northeast led to a huge mobilization that eventually led to the cancellation of that project Phil was one of our consistent reliable sources on what was really going on behind the scenes in Quebec during that whole struggle Phil is mostly here to answer questions but can just offer some brief comments to update on some what's happening in Quebec I don't really have any prepared comments so I can talk to you about Hydro Quebec I can also talk to you about this Muscat Falls project which I've been working on for five years Muscat Falls is really a catastrophe of a project in every way it shouldn't have gotten started and at the time we were doing what's saying that and now everyone's saying but it's almost completed and no one really knows who's going to pay for it or how the system that's in place is that electricity consumers on the island will pay for it recent estimate from Navgore is doubling of electricity rates as soon as it comes online it's designed with a power purchase agreement with an escalating purchase price so the purchase price goes up by 2% every year to figure out how many dollars and kill it out in 50 years from now and it's clear I mean everyone now agrees that people can't pay that much but even if they do the leave or they'll I would still there's this enormous electricity catastrophe that's just I mean it was supposed to be in service by now actually now they're saying in 2020 and this is aside from the problems that Roberta and Stacey are talking about but nothing I agree with but that's for a serious engineering question maybe everything will be fine maybe it won't and it doesn't look like who we're going to know until it's over initially maybe just a little bit of the history of this it was built in the 60s essentially by Heidegger and Essence but through a contract with the government with CHLK and it's a subject of enormous resentment in the laboratory because the price of power under this contract was at the beginning it has gotten even higher but the reason for that is it was really sort of designed to build the economics of building Heidegger said well if we build Churchill Falls instead of building James Bay then and we're going to buy most of the power and put all the money and do all the work and take off the risk then the economics should look somewhat similar so it's a very complicated issue but the result is that for decades now Nusland has deeply resented Heidegger for what they see and most of the all these projects have worked really not foreseen what it was built but 95% of them are standing in Quebec and the lower Churchill project was seen as Nusland's way of getting back this time we're going to do it ourselves this time we're going to do it ourselves that was a driving force in different politics for a really long time all kinds of different projects were started and proposed and developed and when they started the lower Churchill project it consisted of these two dams Nusland falls to the smaller one and the plan was clearly to use Quebec's transmission and bring the power through Quebec and stuff and another long story it didn't quite work out they sort of screwed up their approach Quebec does have an open access transmission system anyone that wants to use competitive power question of timing reservations they got the reservation in first and ended up losing it because they didn't write the right letter at the right time and then so then Quebec had the reservation just after that so they're part of the Oman yes they used this capacity and it would cost a fortune for now for it to build and at this point Danny Williams who is an extremely charismatic premier said I have the answer we have a new solution this sounds like all the problems this is going to make you know we keep going we're just going to build muskite falls and we're going to build it for Nusland because Nusland has a power problem of its own a big part of their winter power comes from an oil burning plant a very old and dirty and expensive oil plant and you know this isn't the time when we're going up and we're going up for a long time and we'll build muskite falls and we'll build a transmission line to the island and we'll use muskite falls power to shut down holy and we're going to save a lot of money, first of all for not having to refurbish it and put in scrubbers and make it into a modern plant and secondly the oil that we're not going to burn for 50 years so this is really a nice solution and then on top of that he negotiated with Nova Scotia to build another underwater transmission line from Nusland to Nova Scotia because muskite falls is far more power than Nusland can use and it's meant that there's a thousand pages of contracts between Algor and Nova Scotia power subsidiary to the maritime so it's a phenomenally complicated system and then you've got a financial loan guarantee from the federal government but at the end of the day the way it's all structured is the consumers in Nusland who really have the cost for it because Nova Scotia is essentially getting well first of all they're getting a lot of free power in exchange for building the transmission line and secondly they got because Nova Scotia essentially promised it they got the right to buy a lot more power at market rates so once this thing is in service the power will definitely go into Nusland some of it will be used there the idea was the initial plan was that about a fifth of it would be used at the beginning and it would gradually increase so 10 years or 20 years later that seems pretty unlikely it's very unlikely that the business economy is going to grow at the same time as its power and so the power then will go to Nova Scotia now the question is, I think from the point of view of exports what happens then? frankly I think most of the power is simply going to be consumed in Nova Scotia which burns a lot of coal the last problem is that it easily burns coal and they have a really good deal they essentially get this power not for what it costs to produce it but it would have cost them more power from the Boston and there may be some left that's exported to Maine but I think that's going to be probably the runs of this now so it's a really tragic situation and it's also a politically tragic situation where this desire profound desire to finally have our own power plant is turning into a project that's really thinking and now they're talking about it great payers can't pay it the same people who weren't doing it so the other little bit that I'd like to talk to you about is hyperconnect which is a very successful kind of conversation with the transformation of electric markets in the 90s and the ISOs and the hourly markets Quebec also transformed its electric system but in a different way it put in place what I don't know if it's a common word but it's well recognized by FERC functional separation so instead of raiding the park for a power company as most of the Northeastern power companies did selling off generation and becoming just a utility a nice company into separate divisions so it has a distribution division which allows power to Quebec almost has a transmission division which is an open and access transmission carrier has a transmission carrier from a lot like the one in FERC requires in the U.S. and on the factory and then they have a generation and it was at the same time that they set up a regulator there's never been a regulation so now what happens is that there's a regulator which essentially has to approve any significant decisions by HQ distribution and by HQ transmission the HQ generation is excluded from that this is due to a transmission displacement in 2000 and as a result HQ generation is really a very secretive entity it obviously communicates with the government communicates with the premier and only with the Ministry of Natural Resources but it doesn't really have any obligations to communicate with Quebecers so what we know actually in many ways americans know more about HQP activities than we do because there are disclosure requirements here and I would all kind of understand the impact from the American public but one thing is so since it wasn't regulated HQP production didn't need regulatory approval it doesn't need regulatory approval to build dams so the big project is still under construction it started in 2009 it's four reservoirs four dams the first two units have been in service for several years and the last two are still under construction this was all designed at the time when it looked like power prices were high and higher and if you read the economic forecast that justified how many they showed new England power prices in 2020 as being something I forget exactly 20 cents on peak and 16 cents off peak to kill what are and you know at those kind of rates the economic argument you can make money with this project but at 3 and 4 cents a kilowatt hour you can't and this is an issue that's sort of been in the background for a long time because there really was a choice to go ahead with the upper dams in the system and it's really hard to see how they make the right sense because really you're producing power there's been a lot of debate and a lot of confusion but it's somewhere on the order of 7, 8, 9 or 10 cents to kill what are and to sell that in the market that you know better than I do but power prices in England now are in the 3 or 4 and 5 cents thanks to fracking thanks to natural gas so how does this make sense sorry? well but the residential rate includes the cost of delivery the cost of transmission I'm talking about the wholesale power rate but on the other hand the system is so large and they have such a large amount of old hydropower that cost practically nothing that it's not a catastrophic situation it's a problematic situation not a catastrophic situation but the situation that is they're building, demanding Quebec has been falling Bitcoin which is subject of current regulatory proceedings boasting Quebec and New Zealand I'm not so curious to know how Bitcoin is being built here in New York State but but what appears to be happening is an HQP which is if business model was to develop a surface business model was to build in order to export it and that's going forward and so there's a lot of power both today and still under development which needs to find a home and that's why this election is taking place thanks so much we have two more speakers and then we'll open it up for questions and discussion for Steve Crowley who's been a campaigner and educator since high school an activist with the clamshell alliance where we first met more than 40 years ago BNRC, the Sierra Club and other organizations he served as the chair of the Sierra Club National Climate and Energy Campaign and as coordinator for the Vermont Coalition to Save James Bay the struggle we were talking about just a bit ago Steve is currently the chair of the Energy Committee for the Vermont Sierra Club and he'll be talking with us about carbon accounting for electricity imports thanks Brian so I think this is going to be quick and I'm not going to dwell a lot on numbers in spite of the fact that that's what this is about and I want to say this is kind of a work in progress because I think what I'm hoping to do with this slide shown with figuring this stuff out is to find some books that we can use here in Vermont to try to have some influence over this in the future we get like a quarter of our electricity from Hydro Quebec right now until the year I think it's 2030 so that's a lot of power I don't think we have a lot of influence there but there are a few areas that I thought I would try to address one is carbon impacts of these direct purchases of electricity from Hydro Quebec second issue is wrecks which are not electricity exactly it's just the renewable attributes of the electricity and third how this might relate how the question of accurate accounting for carbon could relate to the region of greenhouse gas so I'd say 24% of our power 1.3 terawatt hours a year is the number and it's considered renewable in some sense here in Vermont it's considered not directly Hydro Quebec power but large dams and it's allowed to be counted as part of our renewable energy standard and when people talk about our state-wide goal 90% renewable by 2050 I don't think we would have that standard if it weren't for the fact that this fake renewable power is sitting there and to me this whole question of whether this is renewable or not is you know in a way it's a twist of language people talk about the water continually flowing and they know we'll talk dramatically about how it's powered by the sun but it's not just the water that is part of the resource here it's the ecosystem and you know our regulatory system has not really I don't think it's tested this question yet and so I've been lobbying some people to see if we could bring that for bring that forward in the right venue can we really question this idea about whether it's just the water or is it really what is the resource that we're talking about here so the second question is the carbon question and this one does not come up really in our direct regulatory system but it does come up comes up under Reggie and it comes up if you know if we want to get real about dealing with climate change it doesn't matter whether we call it renewable or not what really matters is whether it's producing carbon emissions and greenhouse gas emissions so this there are kind of three elements of this not going to dwell on the numbers here but they exist it's a work in progress there are almost common ranges but what I've found and this is covering a lot of different places in research over the last 20 years is first of all you have the lost carbon sink you have you know 10,000 acres 10,000 square miles excuse me of forest land which you would expect is sitting there soaking up carbon from the atmosphere as it grows some in the plants some in the soil it's soaking up that's the sink and it works out to there's a number there a couple of grams per square meter per day if you take all of the if you do the math and work out how much electricity is produced by those reservoirs and divide that out you get to be something like 120 grams for every kilowatt hour that gets produced that is the lost carbon every year that forest would have been soaking up that much carbon but it's not and that's electricity we get out of it so something like 120 grams for every kilowatt hour and then there's the reservoir missions it varies a lot how much a new reservoir produces more than a old reservoir but that drops off you hear that a lot but it drops off much more dramatically in a tropical reservoir than it does in a boreal forest reservoir or especially a peat reservoir because the cycles go much more quickly when it's hot and they've been building up and building up and building up for so long in these boreal forests and peat lands that there's a lot there so you know where they're adding new reservoirs that bumps it up when they're sitting on old reservoirs it tends to go down but if you do an average if you look at the size of the different reservoirs and how much the different reservoirs are putting out you can come up with an average and it's remarkably close to the lost sink it's rounded off of it here so they're both coming in about 120 grams per kilowatt hour what I have not looked at but what some people have said and I think they underestimate both the sink and the emissions, the reservoir emissions but some people have said that the biggest impact from hydro is in the infrastructure I think that actually may be true in some facilities where you don't have a vast reservoir if you've got a steep channel that's dammed up and maybe you run it on a run of the river mode as opposed to ponding a huge reservoir then I think maybe the infrastructure dominates the carbon emissions but not for these vast not when you're cutting 10,000 square miles of the forest so I don't know what the right number is there but in any case you had those up and it's about 250 to 300 let's see if I have that on the next slide 250 to 300 grams of carbon oxide equivalent for every kilowatt hour of power just for comparison here recognizing that this is another fake number but if you're just counting the direct emissions of burning methane you get 400 grams and I'm sure that varies a lot too based on what kind of plant and what else is the plant for is it older, new and all that we also know that that number should be twice as high now three minutes you know as Phil was saying not far from where we're going so I guess you'd have to say that it still comes in as lower carbon emissions than fossil fuel but it's certainly not zero and I don't think I have this on the slide if you add that up for the 1.3 terawatt hours that Vermont imports every year it comes out to be something like 300,000 metric tons a year of carbon emissions so we don't talk about that much in regulation but we should so a couple of questions here you know expansion is on the table and so newer reservoirs have higher emissions in one report which was done for CLF Conservation Law Foundation Synapse Group and suggested that Hydrocobac and I don't know if you may know about this is when it's you know there are times when Hydrocobac is actually fossil generated power to make up for the you know hydro power that it's selling to the south I don't know if that's true it was in their report anything about that well yeah it does for two reasons during certain hours HGP distribution buys power in the US to serve for its needs a small amount over the year but HGP also can be used to buy power if it can buy now and sell later for more so essentially using reservoirs as storage and in so far as system power so it's not clear that when we buy that power it's actually not being replaced with fossil fuel power next question I'll try to be quick here is about renewable energy credits is everybody familiar with the idea of renewable energy credits I don't spend a lot of time on it but you know there's the idea is that it could be and I think there's some value to these arguments that it can be an efficient way of deploying renewable energy but it's fraught with problems first of all when we are supposedly purchasing renewable energy credits to be able to say that we're kind of supporting renewable energy well it's just not true with Hydro Quebec or other mega hydros because it's not we're not helping the climate situation at all and the second thing I want to ask is if we buy Rex it's one thing if you purchase the power it's real power but if you're buying Rex and Hydro Quebec just has it's not really incentivizing anything it's just paying it's writing a check to Canada to be able to say that we have these Rex it's not actually incentivizing anything so let me just give a quick example here this is Burlington Electric this is how they claim the light blue is well they claim to be 100% renewable with their energy portfolio most of it as you see is Rex purchases the light blue this is the real story for Burlington Electric I don't know if you can read that I can't nuclear natural gas coal distillates oil and over here is the light blue is the real renewable energy so that's Burlington Electric and they're a little more extreme with this than most of Vermont generally does this most utilities are selling the renewable energy that they actually generate as credits down south and covering it up with Hydro Quebec purchases finally just a quick point and this is totally separate but it's still about carbon you know the Reggie program has all the power plants over 25 megawatts purchasing carbon allowances under auction costing something like $114 a ton in these days but for natural gas first of all they're not counting Hydro at all but they don't count out of they don't count imports anyway but it's time that they double their counting for methane because we know methane is producing twice as much as we think and that might be it so the point of this is that this whole system masks it makes us think we're doing a good job when we really have a tremendous opportunity to transition to a clean energy economy and it's really denying us that opportunity so that's it thank you final speaker is Rachel Smolker the co-director of BioFuelWatch an organization based both here in Vermont and in the UK that works internationally on climate energy and land use issues Rachel's on the board of the Global Forest Coalition and the steering committee of the campaign to stop genetically engineered trees which was also founded here in Vermont by some old friends of ours she's been active over the past few years fighting Vermont gas Addison County Pipeline as a founder of the Hinesburg based group Protector Prex Park Rachel has a PhD in biology and worked previously as a field biologist thanks everybody so I was asked to speak here just sort of very generally about the topic of false solutions which is actually a really huge topic talking about climate change and I wasn't quite sure where should I start and I kept thinking well there's so many I mean obviously big hydro is a false solution right? we pretend that there's no methane emissions and we pretend that it's clean and we trade these wrecks around and account it as having zero emissions and being really great which is very much the case for biomass which is the thing that I've been focused on the last well over a decade now and most policies biomass is considered to have zero emissions right? because if you cut down trees and burn them for electricity the theory goes somebody can plant a new tree and the new tree will absorb that same amount of carbon which is totally absurd right? first of all you know a 200 year old tree you can burn in about two seconds even in a small facility like the one we have here in McNeil and it would take 200 years for that carbon to get assuming that a new tree actually was planted and did grow successfully and that if you did that repeatedly the soil wouldn't get so depleted over time that trees wouldn't grow there anymore anyway so the entire logic of it makes very little sense and yet in spite of the fact that we have been fighting that for over a decade now and there's a massive peer reviewed literature and the policies that are supporting that here in the state of Vermont or in pretty much every state Massachusetts has done a few good things but pretty much everywhere the policies continue to pretend that burning biomass is climate neutral has no impact whatsoever on climate and is therefore favored and subsidized along with all of the other renewable energy sources like solar and wind which don't require you to burn anything on going don't require any ongoing fuel and so you know it's the subsidizing of it that actually keeps it going because none of these facilities biomass facilities would be viable without those massive amounts of subsidies so now we're in this position where and I should say too that this came about in part through a funny accounting thing when the IPCC and the UN were deciding how should we account for carbon emissions from the land sector and the energy sector and because of some funny things which we don't really need to go into it came about that this carbon neutral myth was sort of perpetuated and now we're in this decades later with all this peer reviewed literature showing all the carbon emissions that come from deforestation when you burn biomass etc but we still have all the policies in place and now we have the IPCC which is I am party to their new report writing because I have the honor of being a reviewer for them and what do they say in their new report on land mitigation they say well we can reduce emissions in the atmosphere in order to achieve the goal of two degrees or less of warming we need to not only reduce the amount of emissions we put into the atmosphere but we need to actually find a way to take stuff that's already in the atmosphere back out and we don't really know how to do that but we have this great idea bioenergy and carbon capture and sequestration right, BEX so remember clean coal clean coal is a dirty lie anybody remember back in the 90s it's still with us clean coal is still with us and is based on this idea that you can capture the carbon emissions coming out of a smokestack and bury them underground somewhere safely away and out of harms away from the atmosphere and so BEX is basically the same idea but since supposedly it's a carbon neutral and a nutrient will grow and offset any that happened during burning when you take it out and bury it underground you're getting a carbon negative okay this is the IPCC saying that right climate change people who informed us and do inform us so effectively and so well the biggest scientific collaborative effort ever to happen on the planet among human beings that has done so well in telling us about what the impacts of climate change are likely to look at but they have stepped into the realm of like so now what do we do and they have their working group on mitigation and their working group on mitigation is populated by well you think things like ecologists and biologists no, economists so the economists have stepped into the mitigation game for the IPCC and they are promoting this idea of bioenergy and carbon capture and sequestration. You know what there are other great ideas for the land sector emissions by the way the other great idea is that we should encourage the use of wood as a replacement for concrete so maybe we can build tons out of wood instead of concrete I don't know what they're thinking but this is their other big and the UN is now promoting if you go on to the UN SEC website they have this big promo about how the fashion industry the fashion industry according to them and I was shocked to hear this actually I'm not a big dresser but I just didn't have any idea that the fashion industry is responsible for more emissions of greenhouse gases than aviation and shipping all aviation and shipping emissions combined fashion industry just making up the materials and shipping materials and all of that I don't know how they made that assessment but it was a shock for me to hear that so now the UN SEC has a solution we're going to make fashions out of trees there's this wonderful promo video of this woman who's going to Finland and she's going to try on a new dress that's made out of wood with fibers and it's great but it's not totally new the fashion industry has made fabrics like what is it, rayon or lycra or something that's made out of the fiber rayon so it's not totally new making stuff up but are we going to be promoting the use of wood to make electricity make all our fashions and now we have the bioeconomy this whole economy where we can make anything out of anything that's made out of petroleum, chemically could be potentially made out of wood and the chemicals industry all of our building materials etc everybody is basically saying hey we have these forests over here and we can basically just make everything really clean and green by making it out of wood instead and then on the other hand they're over there saying oh the most important thing we can do to mitigate emissions is to protect our forests so we have reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation red this whole policy that's being debated and money is getting poured into it and they're trying to figure out ways to make it good for the human rights of people who are forest dependent especially indigenous peoples so it's such an absurd such an absurd thing I wanted to just very briefly touch on this slide because I think one of the things about big hydro of course is that it's generally classed as a renewable energy this is data from energy information made in administration on US energy I think it's consumption and consumption by energy sources in 2016 and it's not changed that much and what you see is that in energy consumption red here is petroleum the blue light blue is natural gas the dark blue is coal and this is nuclear and 10% of that that little green piece there is all renewable consumption in the US and when you break that down what do you see? you see 24% of our renewable energy in the US is from big hydro and what do you see? you see all of these right here the green, the brown and the light blue is all bioenergy it's biofuels, biomass waste and burning wood and up here the yellow is wind and that tiny little blue thing up there is solar in the tiny little line at the very top is geothermal so a quote 100% renewable energy future anytime very soon is going to take some really serious reconsideration about how we use energy and how we make energy and what we use it for and there's just no way around that I like to also embrace the idea that we can have little microgrades and we'll put solar panels on our roofs and it'll all be really good but it's not going to happen without some really drastic reconsideration of how much energy we use so I wanted to try something new I get really depressed working on this stuff a lot I have a hand up here that I that I helped to put together a long time ago it's called Food Linked in the Hot House it was put together by folks at Rising Tide and Carbon Trade Watch and this was, I mean the climate justice movement at international level was has put a lot of its energy not coming up with all the great things that we ought to do but rather pushing back against all the false solutions that have been promoted at every level from local to international and it's got beautiful artwork and it touches on a lot of things if I were to go through a laundry list of false solutions we'd be here all night but a lot of them are in here and they put things like climate geoengineering and carbon marketing making schemes and nukes and various others and biofuels so I'm going to just put these down here and I hope you'll take them at least from your bedside reading so I do get kind of tired working on this stuff sometimes and coming and being like the talking head and all these I thought today I would try something really different which I'm very nervous about and I've been sweating all afternoon over but I woke up this morning thinking I had in a little bit of like a wrap almost and my daughter said mom that's you don't wrap mom she said basically she said old white girls don't wrap it's cultural appropriation and we do it in a very divided nation so please forgive my transgression I don't mean to make a bad impression but sometimes I need to find a rhyme and I need to find a beat to dissipate a little bit of my heat because my head gets so full of crap sometimes it's really needed to wrap all solutions is more pollution, misinformation and toxic pollution all done just in time this convenient economic pollution certified green products carbon taxes, carbon trading markets cannot save us from the very problem that they made buy an offset plant a tree just don't blame the corporations because it's all by you and me change your light bulbs eat less meat take shelter from the heat we can fly our planes on palm oil mix up cold wood put a tiger in your tank and coordinate and all under your hood clean coal, clean gas, big hydro and biomass are you telling me that's what we get when we kick-puss people ask do you mind stop deceiving stop trying to sell us so much crap stop the corporate CEOs getting rich and faking fat while the world negotiates for decades over this and this and that well I hate to say it but it's now too late there ain't no miracle technology to save us from our fate don't believe them when they tell you we can keep on driving cars because SpaceX is investigating and terraforming the Mars we're wasting time we're wasting lives we're wasting yours and wasting mine while the fire is burning hotter and the oceans are rising faster and our country is run by a monkey who doesn't care who denies that the weather is coming along but we can't do that in paralysis mainly if we run out of time we can't fail in our analysis or fix things with a rhyme we have to fight like hell put our bodies on the line trust our vision and our skills come and join us come and fight we've got everything to lose your life and your legacy your children's future too but we have the right and we have the right and it's up to us to choose so we have about 20 minutes we originally planned about an hour of questions and discussion this evening does our arrangement with the church allow us to go over anybody else who wants to so we'll try to we'll go for the 20 minutes we have and just see where we're at and how we want to go maybe everybody who's on the panel should come up and have a seat here just to put note to what you're saying about muskrat falls and that very little power may hit up clean down here but the go island project you can correct me if I'm wrong about this but the only plan that Newfoundland seems to be coming up with to deal with the economic losses of the muskrat falls is to say well we'll build the second part of the go island and we'll do that and we'll make money off of that by selling that power to the United States so that seems to be their plan for getting out of the economic hole that they've done by building these stands to build into the bigger one and to add another disaster there are people talking about that but I have trouble thinking seriously that they're going to build go island well certainly that now could I mean it's it's leveraged far beyond far beyond reason and the idea that money can be found to do is I don't take it very seriously but on the other hand there's all kinds of big things to hear whispering about the negotiation between Hydro-Quebac and Hydro-Quebac well whether they're coming in to save it today involves building go island and I'm glad to pose a question and I just want to say too that the romaine is not a catastrophe it's a catastrophe for the river it's a complete catastrophe I've seen the romaine river it was the most beautiful pristine one of the longest it was a wild salmon river it had the most spectacular waterfall totally untouched forest wetlands I mean it was a beautiful beautiful beautiful place and it's totally really difficult I was speaking I know I just wanted to make that point I'm sure romaine one and romaine two are in service and the third and fourth what was told that you would have your money now no I don't think so I recall the commission dates were supposed to be in 2019 and 20 so they finished the discussion with one now that is a really good point because the others were built on waterfalls without waterfalls they'd have to flow somebody else yes should I go back to building any other destroying any other river which we're back to right now other than the romaine not to my not right now no there is talk about building another power station on the Saint Mike of it and you hear you hear contradictions I mean for years Haider Quebec has sort of been saying I think we're done after this but then the politicians always want to go down so then the government puts out energy policy that says that Haider Quebec decides about it the next day so Haider Quebec has to do the army and then I came across a study that was produced by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network which is an organization run by Jeffrey Sachs who is under UN auspices studied them together in Haider Quebec about looking at options of dramatically reducing northeast greenhouse gas emissions by dramatically increasing imports from Quebec and it actually looks at a scenario of increasing imports by 30 terawatt hours a year which is essentially doubling what this is made and adding 9,000 megawatts of transmission and it crunches a bunch of numbers and says oh yeah it's a good idea so I talked to somebody at Haider Quebec about it and there's a lot of strange things about it and he said oh it's not a planning study it's not even a feasibility study it's really sort of a marketing study so we could do this this is an advisor doing the Sanders Foundation and we tried to contact him about a month or two ago to get involved and I did send him a copy of the press which would be a benefit but be able to have a discussion with us regarding its positions I talked with him at the launch of SDSN Canada and he was interested and asked me to send him some information which I did I'm not sure who was first this is a sort of a month power planning kind of question just suppose consumption was reduced let's say the capacity needs were reduced by say 50 megawatts which would you do first? would you say no thank you would you say a 20 year continuation of the Hydro Quebec contract or shutting down McNeil's plan? who is that question addressed to just to anybody? I'm actually waiting for Rachel well I would actually in spite of the fact that the biomass facility is my flavor of energy opposition I would say that a 20 year contract with Hydro Quebec would have a lot bigger implication than shutting down which is actually a very tiny biomass facility so that would be what I would say yeah I mean Burlington speaks as if the McNeil plan is its main source of or one of its main sources of electricity but we saw from Steve's chart that it's actually tiny I was shocked to see just how tiny a component of the overall Burlington energy mix is represented by that plan which is one of if not the leading sources of in-state air pollution I think part of the story with that is that they don't take all the electricity from me so that's why they have a smaller slice McNeil burns gas too sorry I mean to attach to any particular utility I was just saying existing Burlington plant is existing Hydro, mega Hydro which which send you takeaway first 20 year contract with Hydro would be very significant stuff so John and then Meg I think there's an aspect to have to look at this is pick your question and everybody is focusing on Hydro I'm saying it's all terrible but every other option I know is worth I'll give it a couple of examples of Newfoundland before they start with the Muscat Falls the debate was do we go do the hydroelectric or do we do offshore of gasoline in 1970 they started doing the James Bay you know which is 30,000 square miles of flooding of the federal government was pushing for nukes and eventually Barossa and his crew said no you know so there are always worse options I think that's one point the other thing I want to ask about especially the fellow from Quebec my understanding is that they subsidize their domestic electricity rates so it's very very cheap no it's not subsidized it's cheap because their power is cheap actually rates have grown up substantially since this restructuring but I think it's a mistake to think of it as a subsidy Hydro-Quebec is a revenue producer the great deal of revenue is where it's completely able to do it and so the money goes back to the government to the taxpayer for one way or the other they charge very low rates there's a very high maximum utilization of Hydro-Quebec is 30,000 megawatts and that occurs in the middle of winter so there's a lot of inefficient heating and so on and so forth if they would charge a higher domestic rate people get it back anyway and then they could have you know basically they could support their other program Quebec is a high level supposedly high level debt the entire economy there's a high level of provincial debt and so we're constantly being oh we gotta cut back on the welfare and all so is that Hydro-Quebec rates are really done on a cost of service basis the system that was developed by Americans in the first part of the century and it is still used in most of the country I mean rates are debated every year the details of it but the basic approach is that the utility charges what it will pay its costs and makes a regulated, a reasonable return on its equity the interesting part is to what extent HQ Distribution has access to HQ Productions power and the 2000 law stipulates that there's a block of $165 a year that HQD can purchase at a regulated or a regulated rate of $3 a kilo HQB still makes money selling to HQD at $3 because its cost of production is under $2 but maybe we can talk about this another time it's a long story, it's a long debate but the idea of raising rates just for the sake of raising rates and make a lot of money you get back in taxes is problematic because there's a lot of winners and losers that does not pay taxes we have a very progressive tax system it's 30% or 40% of the public doesn't pay income taxes so you're taking money out of consumers and people who pay most of the taxes are the wealthy people for example we want to pack carbon to ship away from ham there is carbon emissions we'll grant that from hydro but when you're charging low rates you're basically encouraging excess consumption of the resource domestically and you can correct the tax business about getting rebased so that's not a big show let's hear from some other people and we can come back to this then there's a first and then then you're back I might have caught a lot of questions but what is the most effective way to think to turn that I could suggest something about that in terms of Vermont and in terms of the the closest win for us I think would be to revisit the renewable energy standard that we have which now is three tiered first tier is it's mostly hydro Quebec and that's where 55% now and it grows to 90% tier two is the sort of the to me the right spot that right now is very low that's the distributed renewable generation very low it grows at 1% a year for a while Massachusetts just I think their senate just passed a bill to start higher and increase by 3% three times as fast so I think that it's doable and it's shown to be doable because these other legislative bodies are saying yes we can do that but we don't because we have these other things we can say we don't need to because we get hydro Quebec but I think that's the biggest thing that I would say is the first thing we should go after in Vermont is increasing that renewable energy standard the tier two sorry do you think the Massachusetts that would be the same answer well that's what they're going for you know the example I gave was Massachusetts and I think Rhode Island has a similar one that they've introduced and so Massachusetts the RPS does not right so again similar to our tier two they're 3% a year like our tier two that's 1% a year but at the same time they went to adopt the legislation that I don't know the details of it but that essentially obliged them to purchase a large block of imported hydro power so it went around the RPS yes but I would think that the most efficacious thing that we could do is somehow require greater efficiency I mean that's where that's the number one thing we should be doing it's very unsexy but it's the most important thing because if we're reducing the energy consumption then we are not using power so I mean here in Vermont we've been debating increasing funding for home weatherization for years and we get lip service and yet we have a hard time even maintaining a steady level of state support for home weatherization second oldest housing stock in the country well first I could do first you were first and then you're next I just wanted to respond to the thought about hydro power in contrast to other sources of energy and to point to the fact that the aborigines in that area have suffered tremendously and you know as part of the flooding a lot of their livelihoods were based on traffic and territories and most of those are hugely impacted they're not even territory anymore they're just flat, late water I think that's a really important issue and I think the film sort of pointed to that and there are no easy solutions but I think to say that the type of social devastation for aborigines is is less of a problem than you know some offshore drilling which obviously is a huge problem I think that's not really looking at most I don't know exactly where I'd be where to start with the problem but this woman here was talking about fashion and then we look at what is what comes off of that as far as carbon fashion comes from a certain mindset that mindset is promoted by society by the way that we're taught and educated by the academics we're into math and science and we hold this regard to other ways of thinking or pulling in what it means to be human so why don't we go to the root of the problem that creates the need to consume which has to do with dissatisfaction in one's way of being and the way that one is in the world so if we got to that there could be a great reduction in material need and really not suffer because if anybody's been anywhere like some of these people with indigenous people or if you travel they never went to some of the poorest places in the world there's a lot of joy there what happened here I don't want the one but in Laos they just lost a big dam I don't know if you know about that okay I was in China in the 80's and I went through the Three Gorges before they built that dam they're proposing I think either 40 new dams or a total of 40 dams whatever if you want to talk about rotten water and rotten food you guys are just stopping up north it has to do with not the system the way that we are not thinking as an alternative way of being let's with academic let's start with some of this stuff but you have to find joy you have to find happiness for the people you can't put them in debt you can't put the kids in debt and you can't start out that way if you start out that way they are they cannot break free you got the t-shirt on so a simple way of being and there's other philosophies that come from other lands that can very well be listened to and joy can be found in the population to transform this political system from a way of not use in Kenya they're starting to complain about electricity use there not from the people but the people have already put in the dams we use I think 13,000 kilowatts a year as a human being in the United States and what they in Kenya they're only using like 350 but I'll get the payback I hope Africa can pay attention to what is happening here and in Niger we lost four guys in the Green Beret and there's a lot going on that we don't pay attention to Niger is one of the poorest countries in Africa they got a natural resource and many others it's uranium I would like the academics to look into where that uranium goes start with France if they're getting their electricity from Niger for all of these years and believe me I don't have any facts I just hear a lot and I've been around a little bit let's see how much France put back into Niger let's see how much France put into Vietnam before they were thrown out they're not very we're not sharing very much and allowing indigenous people to stay in their joy we don't just help them to get a little bit happier with clean water a little bit of medicine we have to go in and have them be just like us thank you that's my two cents I think we have a partial response from Joan Joan Sacks is also here from the Sierra Club in May I wanted to ask you what's the extent to the are you just one of the leaders? yeah so they were in Paris they were mandated to do a report on how to achieve 1.5 degrees so that report is in the second draft that's already been through and I can't remember why it's supposed to be released I think it's in the caliber coming up I think that's right a lot of people commented on it and there was actually a very large group of people who made comments about some of the things that I brought up and there were many other concerns but how they got incorporated especially in the effective summary I don't know yet and then this land mitigation report it was in a very embryonic phase when it came out for its first round of review I would say where it will end up I don't know but you know when you start there it's like a long path to envision how drastically it would need to change to really reflect the international coalition of groups that are really intimately involved with all of this who are actually producing their own version of what land mitigation should look like and what we need to support because just trying to comment in little forms with little comments all that is just like you can't make any really profound change so it makes more sense to try to express the real vision that people have I think people are working on right now so it's a I wish you'd send your phone to the Times there's an ephelon to the ephelon but the piece of paper doesn't last yeah I'd like to have a copy of it anyway so it's a couple of minutes after seven should we go another 15-20 minutes it seemed about right yeah I just had another comment this is a bio amounts issue is it I'm sorry is it a cow? yeah have you looked at any of the there's been a lot of carbon accounting done at UVM there's a guy Tony DiMotto who's sort of runs a forestry school for the most part he's done a lot of carbon accounting and everything I've seen is very different from what you described you know he comes up with a it's a mixed scenario it depends a lot on how the forestry is done with that but I just urge you to take a look at some of that because it really has a different slant altogether and especially for example the idea that when we use bio mass that land is really not being used to grow trees afterwards and therefore the carbon sequestration of tree growing is not an issue and I just would be very curious to know any thing more than a acre or two in all of New England that's been used for bio mass that is not being returned to forestry I mean if you have some I'd love to know that is not being returned to forestry well I haven't gone out there and looked at every acre that's been harvested and there's different levels of harvesting so I would have no answer to that you were saying that that's one of the problems is the land is often not used for returning to forestry and we can't just go out there and assess every acre well there are territories that do speak to that and that's why I'm asking the question because the territories don't show that long well the inventory is also I mean a very fundamental problem with the inventories is that they don't differentiate between say tree plantations replanted forest and what happens when you cut say an older or even an old growth forest they basically equate tree cover as tree cover so you have I just came back from the Pacific Northwest where there's all this ancient old growth dug for beautiful seed or forest that has been clear cut and replaced with monocultures all of that in most of the accounting is done it's forest, it's forest it's a plantation of the forest if it's an old growth forest it's forest, it's forest it's planted forest maybe or sometimes there's some differentiation but I just want to go back to the first comment that you made what I want to be clear about is that there is a huge lot of people working in academics with exactly that carbon neutral myth very repeatedly and very thoroughly with careful measurements and long research but it hasn't translated into the policy realm the policies are still continuing to support the idea that it's carbon neutral to burn trees for electricity for the most part there's a little bit more nuance in the game right now like Europe just revised their renewable energy directive and there's some more nuance in there and there's the idea that we have to have some sustainability standards in place and whether that works or not so I don't want to say that there's not there's a lot of people out there and a lot of people in academics who have been arguing this point for a very very long time but the policies have not changed to reflect that well I think there's more information out there among the National Policy Committee for Society of American Foresters and we've looked at the work we've looked at the work that comes out of university and we have position statements that you know they will talk directly to that issue and they reflect the most recent science so there may be other policy issues in places but as far as the professional group of foresters are concerned it's a direct translation we work completely with people like Johnny's mom scientists at the university and I'm going to translate that into policy in terms of whether a state standard for example has a renewable energy goal and whether biomass burning is subsidized under that or supported under that or not I'm wondering how you as the Society of American Foresters translate the knowledge that you have about this into the policy because we're directly related to the nature of the players in the forest and whether it's the U.S. Forest Service whether it's corporations whether it's small landowners whether it's the discussion and that's where we have the position statement so that people can talk to a group that does forestry as their livelihood and as their focus and that's where we have this so that I mean I don't know enough about it to say of a specific state of a specific policy and how that will develop but that's all definitely in place there's a hand in the front here I just want to I just want to ask you a question I've been reading that large old growth forests are sequestered carbon at a much greater rate than young trees and a diverse forest does so how do you respond to that in your policy if you're talking about monocultures which is what is replaced most of the time in forestry how do you answer that? There's a lot of where you are so in New England monocultures typically do not replace lands that are forested there is a lot more of it in the Northwest some of that's also been going on for quite a while and personally and professionally I want to preserve every acre of old growth there's not a lot forestry is like a lot of disciplines there are two extremes some people would be perfectly fine with harvesting every acre of everything other people who are foresters are looking at it purely from an ecological standpoint and really harvest as little as possible speaking for this society we try to strike the middle but there is no overriding goal of destroying what little old growth there is whatsoever just from my perspective they're all across from New York through Vermont and Hampshire and Maine we have a very large contiguous forest that is essentially the lungs of New England since we're also at the tailpipe of the rest of the country we should be preserving that forest in every way we possibly can that's my perspective Can we give them back to Meg? I mean I don't think that there really is a middle ground between industry there's no middle ground at all the extreme position that we find ourselves in is we're in hot water and we probably can't get out but we have to put all of our creative resources all of our industrial resources you know and that's a very there's a lot of caveats to how to use your industrial resources wisely into all of our energies into trying to get the hell out of this mess just because things are greener in Vermont right now doesn't mean things look really good or even tenable in the medium term here so I think you know so much of this analysis to me it just I just sit around and kind of think about the Titanic and the diving teams come back up out of the engine room and they're like yeah this is what happens it was the engines no it was they come and they examine the hole oh the hole is this big this is the rate going down right we're going down right what anecdotally what has created the kinds of cultural shifts that are needed right because we need a cultural shift there's not you know here we are going to analyze and reassess and convene and curate these conversations about what the real problems are but or what the rhetorical solutions might be but how are we to force the god damn application of those solutions and we need to create a platform for so doing it's not about a platform is only going to be good a powerful flat platform is only going to be good for the application of one solution right it's going to be good for trying some shit probably screwing it up and trying some more shit as soon as possible right in the very near time in 1.5 degrees celsius I don't know the odds they're giving that anymore but they're not really giving it any god damn odds the odds that we're getting is that once we get to well above 2 degrees celsius what do the feedback groups start to do and all of the shit that we're not even supposed to really talk about in public and all of that crap so at the end of the day I don't think it's a question of whether or not you can industrially harvest timber that's absurd the way that that's being done by forestry it keeps on being trying to protect jobs and resources is really important that's real but it keeps on being short term jobs against society and against brown and black bodies around the world who are going down in Syria and going down you know under water in the Marshall Islands of course but you know so I guess my question to anybody on the panel is you know what are the opportunities to try to build some people power and you know how what's the messaging what's the rollout look like to actually do something that turns our back a little bit temporarily on all the data and tries to create some kind of a platform to get some crap done let me try and say a couple of things about that the first is that pushing forward more real renewables is critically important for a number of reasons one of all the things that Steve said another is the more you rely on renewables and anyone who has solar panels or an electric car knows this the more you think about what you're using that's really important those two things go very much together another point I have enormous admiration for people who engage in the process that produces all this crap that is you have the PUC here in Vermont you have all of these hearings and procedures and so on in Quebec you have to have people who stand up for the rights of people who are facing the consequences of disasters like that what's more what we come to understand from dealing with all of that is the value of what was destroyed and one of the huge problems we have is all this playing around with language that goes on what counts as renewable what doesn't count as renewable and all of the economic manipulation that goes on in order to solve a problem is all of the level of fantasy what really is going on when people deal in these situations on those terms is that they are destroying the world to save the world and that makes no sense whatsoever and they're huge huge things that are being done I mean Hydro-Quebec is a tremendous sort of thing transporting all of that power from far away into urban centers it's what I was saying before as you push renewables you actually get back to the Edison situation of generating a small scale for local people who you know and so on and that really is what matters and it seems so frail in relation to these gigantic problems but it's really all there is if we can convince the State of Vermont to have ecologists and environmentalists who know something about the world figuring in the determination about whether we should build certain projects or not we would be at a tremendous advantage relative to where we are are they going to do it no and that gets to Rachel's point and that is we can keep pushing all of these things and when they say no no no no we will get angrier and angrier and angrier and we get more and more people out to throw them out and that's what's going to resolve this problem and nothing else but you have to keep pushing from within the circumstances that you're given to deal with these things little will produce big results I think I love this guy let's maybe give others on the panel a chance to respond to the question how do we move forward from here in a way that's proportional to the scale but it's not what it's how it's kind of a question right I think there's the what is part of the how actually I think that you have to have a vision and you know what's the vision my when I talk to some of the people that do this stuff like in Montpelier BNRC and say I left those folks they've been working hard on nuts and bolts and that's what they have access to and what they are about as a potential success in the short term and that's what they need organizationally but they also need to define a vision and I don't think it's one of those things you're not going to get right immediately but I think they really need we need a vision of where we're going I don't know if you translate culture directly through a vision I think you do that by accident but I think we need a vision of where we're going with an energy economy a transformation of society and so I guess I believe that people don't really buy into it if you're just dealing with the nuts and bolts and by the way this is an enormous earth shattering problem that's nuts and bolts out of the way you can't do that people don't believe it so you need something bigger that people can believe in and that's about efficiency and renewables and that sort of thing but then the other side of it we haven't really started to address yet which I think we need to have this conversation is the earth is changing and things are not going to be the same and we can see that in California we can see it in many many places around the earth far ahead of us we're sort of on the tail end of the impacts here and yet we're going to have the impacts too and how much worse are the droughts going to get in the summertime before we have to start thinking about water policy in a way that we have big reservoirs that we tap also and what does that mean and what's the cost of that so that that whole area when we talk about mitigation this whole area of adaptation what's the next phase of life for us we need a vision for that too and I felt for a long time I mean people say if you think too much about adaptation just giving them excuses to go and make things worse but my view is that's the real cost of climate change is when we wake up we have to deal with this new world how are we going to move New York City back how are we going to move Boston back from the coast and who's going to obviously it's the people who have the resources who are going to be able to handle that more easily what about all these other people that can't do it so to me there's just a host of issues that come up in this realm of adaptation Vermont's insulated to some degree and I think the issue is really a big one for us down the road where are our kids going to get their food and are they going to get it from where we get it now I doubt it I mean those places are all experiencing droughts right a lot of our nation's food comes from the drought in the Midwest the Central Valley of California all suffering right now in the snowpack that provides water I think the answer has already been started to be addressed with local food in Vermont to some degree but we have to expand that we have to figure out how to use the soil in a way that captures carbon and doesn't food like Champlain and and can provide for our children and we have to not turn into shopping bags we're going to give people out west am I right millions right now they've been getting it for years now what happens to the wetlands out there in the past why soy they could sell to China but anyway so I agree with a lot everything that Steve said but I think here in Vermont Maine is a state that has 1.3 million people you have 654 1,000 I think is something like that here in Vermont so we're both states that have smaller populations than the cities for me I live on an island I'm already seeing subsidence subsiding all the you know the bluffs on my island my son is a lobsterman and a boat builder and I am a farmer I've had the fourth year in a row of drought I have sheep I have been putting cisterns in plant windbreaks because the wind situation we're having right now is pretty significant and you know I was just on the way up here talking about somebody who's using biomass to heat greenhouses for an organic a big organic farm on the island that's not a sustainable solution we have to figure out and I think we as small communities whether it's my island my small state or your even smaller state can be examples to the rest of the country and how if we really see our states as or our locations as islands as small communities where you can really address these things but it takes everybody to have the solution you really have to get into the schools you have to work with the children's trust to get the kids to sue you know those things are incredibly important for the kids speaking about this stuff I just was at a not recently but recently at a hearing at the department of environmental protection in Maine where kids were speaking they listened the rest of us just helped them get to the point of being able to talk and they are very articulate about what's going on in their world so I think that's we need to help those kids get there and to speak about it so kids in Vermont this spring semester had three events of over 2,000 youth that they organized at the state house that's amazing Phil, last thoughts I don't really have an answer but I do think that knowledge is important my work is on electricity electricity systems are really complicated and if you don't get the complexity that you don't understand what the people are saying to you and you know to say we want 100% renewable perfectly clean and green electricity system is a great objective but then you have to sort of think what does that actually mean in terms of electricity systems that functions and there aren't the answers aren't really easy there are difficult tradeoffs and there are cost tradeoffs you know nobody wants their rates to double either but I think it's really important for the environmental movement for concerned citizens to be part of the discussion but I often see there's this enormous divide because the people who are actually deciding what's going to happen are talking on a completely different they're using a different language and dealing with problems that aren't obvious to the general public and so it's cool but it's also that you know these changes in the 1990s electricity by its nature is complicated but the systems that now manage it are insanely complicated these hourly markets and the hourly capacity markets and every state has its own very very complicated structures which is part of the problem Rachel, last thoughts let's see I guess people are always you know complaining to me about well you don't like biomass and you're complaining about hydro and you don't like the Vermont gas pipeline and what do you want you know should we just go back to the Stone Age and you know what is it I think I embarrassingly admit that you know well the Stone Age might not be that bad really but people live for millions of years without all this stuff and if we were to actually stop and think and set priorities about what we absolutely need in order to have some joy it wouldn't really be that much and we could survive like it's not like if the power goes out oh my god life is going to end you know and we need to like start to embrace that idea that we can and that we need to set priorities and that we need to have basically like emergency planning in place for when we turn into Puerto Rico here you know because that's coming our way so that's one of my thoughts the other thing I just want to add a voice for biodiversity because you know we get into these conversations about all this stuff and it's about how it's going to impact people how it's going to impact people how it's going to impact people it's like we're completely removed from the rest of the web of life and the rest of the web of life is like completely collapsing around us so you know what we do to support the ecosystems that are remaining and restore them is really restoring the web it is our best line of defense in every respect so allowing for example forests to grow back to their you know it's not just about carbon sequestration or how much energy we can get out it's about supporting the web of life on earth that provides our oxygen and everything else and I feel like that just too often gets out of the equation and we talk a lot about I mean human rights are a very important thing and not a lot will happen without human rights being respected but we need to also start incorporating the rights of nature into our thinking at every level I want to add a couple of thoughts I agree that we need culture change we also need political and economic change and the way culture is politics and economic change I know you agree with this is through social movements and here in Vermont we've been slowly building the beginnings of a movement that can deal with these questions I think the leading edge demand that emerged out of the fight against the pipeline in Addison County was no new fossil fuel infrastructure we now have more than 35 towns in Vermont on record supporting that demand and over the next several months we'll be figuring out how to move forward with that the other point I want to make is that we have a paradox of scale in this system under the current economic and political arrangements only the largest and most disruptive implementations of renewable technology are considered economically viable and that's not okay and we have a system that at the same time that it's nickel and diming us around affordability of renewable energy thrives on waste thrives on militarism and continual expansion and we really need to get to the core of questioning this system yeah just to say quickly I'm not saying that knowledge is not power I just think that in the way the movement was framed by McKibben and Hanson that was only about knowledge and that we were going to just use raw information to sway the tide in the policy arena was drastically and just the most terrorism it was such a bad movement so lacking in strategy and a lot of lives were lost as we lost that ground there's got to be parity between building people power and analysis back in here tomorrow at 2.30 we're gathering on the road outside the snow mountain resort at the top of Smuggler's Notch to respond to the governor's conference and the fact that they're not dealing with these questions with many of these questions and then we'll have our own press conference at 5 in response to the governor's press conference at 4 or 5 thank you